by Keats · Cluster: Guilt · Conscience · Fate and Free Will
Abstract
A sonnet praying to Sleep, the ‘soft embalmer’, to seal the soul and save the speaker from gnawing conscience and the returning day. It treats sleep, night, conscience, and the longing for oblivion.
Connections
Motifs: Sleep, Night Themes & Concepts: Conscience, Self-Knowledge, Guilt Forms & Genres: Sonnet
Testo integrale / Full text
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom - pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the ‘Amen,’ ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes, -
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Save me from curious conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my Soul.